


This Last of Meeting Places

by Smaragdina



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Psychological Torture, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-21 00:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/591175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The wind whips around them both, and the fall under their feet is long, so long, all the men he must kill and the games he must play. “Again, Corvo. Again.”" The Outsider begins to set up tests for Corvo in his dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Last of Meeting Places

**Author's Note:**

> Contains spoilers for the Dunwall City Trials DLC.
> 
> The title is a line from T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men."

He has tried so, so hard not to be boring.

The months go by, and the city rights itself, and Corvo’s mask sits silent and still in a drawer in his room in Dunwall Tower except for the days when it doesn’t. He builds himself a shrine in blue and Void-lit violet – not in Jessamine’s secret chamber in the Tower, because that room had been hers, but rather far below in the networks of sewers that Burrows’s spies had known so well. He builds it in a place with sloping walls and water covering the floor. It seems fitting. The Void seems to whisper in the room, and the blue and purple fabric around it blows in a wind that is not there, and Corvo bends at the shrine and whispers as well. And on the days when he wears the mask he always returns to the shrine and lets the blood on his boots wash off and rejoin the water on the floor; and this is fitting, too.

The Outsider does not appear.

He does not dream of the Void. His dreams are ordinary, human, nightmare – Havelock and the others standing over him and speaking of death as he could do nothing, Daud’s face in the fading evening light. Climbing Kingsparrow Lighthouse toward the sound of Emily’s voice and _slipping_ , falling into rain and water. Jessamine. Over and over.

Later, he will realize that these nightmares are a kindness.

*****

“Think of it as a game,” says the Outsider. He walks on empty air, over a succession of long, long falls. “Think of it as a test.”

“A test of what?” says Corvo, jaw set. He spares a glance down. Vertigo hits him in a rush and he has to step back from the edge. The platform on which he stands is tilted; the entire Void is tilted, and wind rushes through the cracks. It is as if they are standing in a Dunwall that has been broken apart and is in the process of being tossed down at random and rebuilt into new shapes. He supposes this is more accurate than it seems. Corvo grips his sword tight in hand as if it is a tethering rope and dares a quick glance down, again, at the target who is unknowing and so far away. “What if I miss?”

“You fall.”

“And?” His throat works. "What happens if I refuse?"

"You refuse."

_"And?"_

No answer is forthcoming.

Corvo squeezes his eyes shut, clutches his sword as tight as he can, and leaps. Wind rushes in his ears like the sound of a storm in flapping sails. He falls, and he misses, and the target rushes past him and he _falls_. The empty ocean of the Void opens around him. Fades. He imagines that he hits water and plunges down. He imagines that he feels shadow-clothed arms wrap around him. He imagines that he hits and breaks upon the surface of the sky or the sea.

None of these things happen. Not precisely. Or, they happen all at once.

He appears where he’d begun, gasping for breath. The Outsider stands before him and shrugs. “Again.”

*****

There are things he learns about the Void.

Gravity tilts. He walks upon the undersides of bridges, falls upward toward the top of familiar lighthouse. In the waking world he finds himself struck by sudden moments of disorientation, vertigo, impossibility – he stands there shaking his head because he has _seen_ this street before, run down it as it turned under each step, because he _knows_ its facsimile in the Void and expects that wall to be broken, that lamp to be uprooted, that avenue to turn and twist and yawn open like the jaws of a snake.

He runs in a straight line alongside a screaming train and looks over his shoulder to find that straight line broken (and then the train hurtles ahead of him, and  then the Outsider appears before or above or behind him, runs a cool hand through his hair, straightens Corvo’s shoulders and lifts his chin because Corvo will not do it himself, orders “again”).

He walks through a house that’s full of water like air. Finds himself in a room with no roof, just water running upward to the surface of an inverted sea. He climbs on top of a table and reaches up to lay his hand against it, finds that it is cool as the surface of the mirror and that it bows under his touch.

There are men all through the waterlogged house, and they do not love him. Corvo tries to evade them and fails, ten times, ten dispassionate whispers of “again” echoing in his ears. On the eleventh, he swims his way upward. Claws through the ceiling that isn’t a ceiling, and the water accepts him. He breaks the surface a minute or an hour later to find that the house is gone and he is standing on nothing, just empty space; and the Outsider offers him a hand and pulls him upright, takes his face between his hands and seals his mouth over his to draw all the water out of Corvo’s lungs in one gasp and breathe the air back in, and the “good” he whispers tastes like _triumph_.

*****

“Why?” Corvo asks.

Underneath him, the body of the man he’d kicked down and killed breaks apart, melts away like flecks of ash in a fire.

“That is,” says the Outsider, “such an interesting and varied question.”

Corvo swallows hard. He looks down. The man he’d dropped down upon and murdered is gone, yes, but there is still blood upon the stone. “What are you testing, I guess,” he finally decides upon. “Does this have a point? Does _anything_ you do have a point?”

He does not realize that they’ve  moved until he finds himself pressed against the wall of the tunnel where they always begin. The Outsider’s hand is curled loose around the base of his throat, arm outstretched. His face is perfectly smooth and composed. His fingers are like steel. “Everything I do has a point,” he says, and though Corvo expects it he does not _hiss_.

 “That’s not an answer,” Corvo chokes out, and the words have to claw their way out past the Outsider’s grip.

The Outsider only gives the smallest shake of his head. Releases him. Steps back. The wind whips around them both, and the fall under their feet is long, so long, all the men he must kill and the games he must play. “Again, Corvo. _Again_.”

When Corvo wakes in the morning, he finds five bruises around his throat in the shape of five exact fingers, purple and blue and black.

*****

The first time he dies, it’s an accident.

He misses a jump and stumbles, smacks his hands against the stone, gets to his feet only in time for the man to yank him to his feet with a hand around his throat, slap away his attempt to lunge forward, brace him back against a balcony wall and _thrust_. Corvo crumples to the ground, body curling in around the emptiness he suddenly finds just below his ribs. It’s too sudden for him to even scream.

It doesn’t even hurt that much. Searing pain where the man had stabbed in, yes, and mirrored searing pain on his back where he’d stabbed through and out, but nothing in between. Just a curious hollow sick sense of loss.

Before the Void goes dark, Corvo has time to be grateful that the only red the man wears is the red of his own blood spattering his hands.

He wakes in his own bed, panting, curled in the position in which he’d died with the sheets twisted around him and every centimeter of his skin slick with sweat. The bone charms rattle in their drawer by his bed. They hiss and whisper. It is a long time before Corvo can go back to sleep, and this time the dreams are regular nightmares.

(“Does it help?” the Outsider will ask him the next night, as they sit together on a rooftop with legs dangling over the wide expanse of nothingness. “Knowing what she felt like?”).

*****

The second time he dies it’s planned, though not by him. A prickling on his hand is the only warning. Time _snaps_ around him and Corvo finds himself caught up in his own magic, as horribly frozen as the rest of his victims as the coiled razors he’s planted _explode_. He can’t move as they hurtle toward him, so slowly, slow enough for him to _see_ the surface of his coat and then the surface of his skin split; he can’t move at all as they flay into him. Dozens of them. He is leisurely and meticulously torn to ribbons, and time flows too slowly for him to be able to scream.

“I wanted,” the Outsider tells him, “for you to know what it feels like. Being slowly taken apart, piece by piece. I wanted you to _know_.”

Corvo’s still shivering. He’s reformed in a part of the Void that’s strange to him (the idea that he _knows_ parts of the Void is stranger still). “I do,” he manages, thinking of Jessamine, the words clumsy in his mouth. “I _do_.”

They walk upon the tongue of a whale. The flesh around them is red and dripping. Teeth and baleen jut out around them in shapes of madness, and as Corvo looks up he sees tears form in the roof of the mouth, widen, sewn open with silver knives. The air is full of a wretched sawing sound, and a second sound, and the mouth around them shudders and Corvo realizes that this second sound is living screaming. Hot blood spatters down across his face.

“Not,” says the Outsider, “like this.”

*****

The third time he dies it’s his own fault. He misses the shot and the whale oil falls and explodes and flames around him. It rushes over all the burn scars from Coldridge on his skin and reopens them, and Corvo _screams_.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth times are deliberate, because he sees more tanks raining down and decides he’d rather slit his own throat than subject himself to that fire again.

“Shh,” murmurs the Outsider, when Corvo wakes after the seventh. He’d first fallen asleep in the chair before the shrine and he’s there again now, bent over on the floor. Shaking. He’s on his hand and knees in the icy water, trying to remember how to breathe past the bite of steel in his throat. The Outsider crouches next to him. Physical. Hand so gentle stroking over his hair. He kisses the tears from Corvo’s face as if he is a child.

*****

Emily notices that he’s  not sleeping.

“Are you okay?” she asks him over breakfast. Face crumpled with worry. She’s getting older, now, and the clothes and titles of an Empress are finally starting to fit right on her, and Corvo supposes that she’s finally old enough to start looking after him instead of solely the other way around. She looks so like her mother.

 _I found your doll,_ he wants to tell her. _The one you lost? I’ve found it a hundred times over, at the bottom of a well, at the top of tower, in the sewer, in a safe, floating in nothingness. I once cut open the belly of a man and found it there inside. The Outsider loves a practical joke._

Corvo says nothing, though, and Emily peers at him. “You’re not having nightmares again, are you?”

He thinks of the dreams he used to have, before the Outsider became bored: Jessamine and Havelock and Daud. Emily, lost. Climbing the lighthouse to find her and falling, _falling_ , and the dream is not like those in the Void because when he falls he _dies_.

“No,” says Corvo. And it’s true. He has not been permitted such gentle dreams in a long, long time. “No, I’m not.”

*****

“Why?”

The Outsider frowns. “When will you stop asking that question?”

Corvo glares at him. He’s outrun the train, at long, long last; and they’re standing on its tracks and it’s hurtling toward them both, but he knows that when it hits he will be the only one who dies. The thought doesn’t bother him as much as it should. He’s grown frightfully used to dying, here, just as he’s grown used to falling. “If you’re going to make me jump through hoops every night for the rest of my life, I should at least be allowed to know –”

“ _Because_ ,” snaps the Outsider. Shadows twist at his back, take on the shape of fins and tentacles and teeth. His eyes are lit. “Because I am bored and I _know_ you, better than you know yourself, all the things that drive you and the things you used to dream about in the night. Because you used to surprise me, and I am sick of being unsurprised. Because you’ve always done _so well_. Your human world is not enough of a challenge for you. This is not a test of what you can do. This is a test of what you _cannot_.”

And he’s gone, then, and the train bears down on him with a scream of crunching metal and breaking bone; and Corvo barely notices the pain. Not anymore.

*****

He’s standing in a ring of corpses, Weepers and guards and Whalers, the spindly legs of a Tallboy sticking up at crazy angles toward the shimmering sky. Corvo reaches up to pull the mask from his face. Remembers that this is the Void, and there is no mask at all. He closes his eyes and catches his breath rather than look at the faces of the bodies around him. “Who are they?”

“Who?”

“Don’t give me that. You know who I’m talking about.” His frown is gone as soon as it’s formed, because being angry at this being in his domain is a very bad idea. Even though as the years go by Corvo finds that its harder and harder to care. He gestures at the corpses with the hand that does not hold his sword. “Them. The men you have me kill when I’m here.”

“Just men.”

“But _who?_ ”

The Outsider sighs. Steps down from the air to stand in the room with Corvo. “They are dead,” he murmurs. “All of them. Don’t trouble yourself.”

Corvo laughs, turns away; because _troubling himself_ over dead men is something he hasn’t had the luxury to do since Jessamine was alive. He watches out of the corner of his eye as the Outsider bends down and carefully pries the mask from the head of a dead Whaler. Corvo has never seen the faces of these men without their masks; and indeed, there is nothing behind the gas-mask eyes. Just a black empty hole. The room melts away before Corvo can even recoil, the mask vanishing in the Outsider’s hands.

“They are those you’ve killed,” the Outsider murmurs. “They are your memories. They are all men who’ve died at your hands. You’re responsible for them all. Each and every one.”

Corvo shudders and closes his eyes. And indeed, he has seen familiar faces in the crowds that are sent against him; he’s been set loose on conjured dinner parties where he’s murdered, over and over, those who he used to know. The Pendleton twins, a Lady Boyle who has no face behind her mask, Teague, Treavor, others. But there is something _wrong_ in the Outsider’s words, and Corvo has to swallow down sickness before he can voice it. “I haven’t killed nearly this many.”

“Haven’t you?”

They are sent against him, then. Again and again. And as Corvo fights, blade and bomb and crossbow and pistol, the Outsider whispers in his ear. _Names_. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Some had died at Corvo’s hand and some had died later, indirectly: brothers pressed into service, friends killed by plague when the guard providing for them vanished, family slain by grief, guards given a new shift to fill the shift of the dead. He recognizes some of their faces. He recognizes far fewer than he’d like. He recognizes none of their names.

“These are all the men you’ve killed,” the Outsider tells him, over the clang of sword and the smell of so much blood on the air. “This is all your doing.”

When Corvo dies, this time, it’s by his choice.

*****

He stops going to the shrine.

He throws the bone charms into the sewer so that they stop whispering to him in the night with a litany of _again, again, again_. As he watches them swirl into the water, the skin on the back of his neck prickles; and he knows exactly where the sewers will carry them. They will be lifted up by the water and laid to rest in a room with blue-and-purple cloth, sloped walls, and freezing water on the floor.

He does not throw away his mask. He uses it. Emily has enemies, after all; and the faces of these enemies begin to appear in his dreams, set against him again, killed over and over and over _again_.

He tries not to be boring. He tries so incredibly hard.

It does not work.

*****

“No,” he says.

It is an impossible jump. He has grown so used to falling, but –

The Outsider sighs. Steps up to loop an arm around Corvo’s waist, peer down along with him into the crazy sloping tunnel down to a target that neither of them can quite see. “You think it’ll be you,” he murmurs. “You think you’ll plummet down and land upon the body to find that you’ve stabbed yourself in the heart.”

Corvo shudders. “Isn’t that what you’re working toward?”

“Nothing so crude.” The Outsider strokes a hand down his cheek, down the burn scar, down in a line that makes Corvo twitch as if he’s a puppet. “After all,” he says, “you have never killed yourself.”

Corvo winces. Thinks of Coldridge, the way the pre-Coldridge face on the old wanted posters and the face he now sees in the mirror every day do not _match_. Even ignoring the hundreds of times he’s died in the Void, the Outsider’s words are not exactly true.

He closes his eyes and sways, forward, catching himself before his balance fails and he falls down inelegant and wrong. The Outsider steadies him with a gentle hand on his elbow. His words are nearly inaudible over the howl of wind around them. “Do you want me to push you?”

 _Yes,_ Corvo thinks. _Yes, please._ He breathes in. Breathes out. “I want to push _you_ ,” he says, instead. “For making me do this. Sometimes I wish I could kill you.”

The Outsider chuckles. “None of those things are going to happen.”

And Corvo knows that if he turns around and looks at those softly laughing eyes, he will stab the man in the heart; he knows that if he turns around there will be _nothing_ there, just the mad rippling air of the Void. And so he steels himself, and grips his sword, and steps forward. And leaps.

*****

He falls.

*****

It’s not himself.

*****

It’s much worse.

*****

He’s still falling.

*****

Corvo wakes to find the Tower guards beating on his door because he’s woken _screaming_ , because his throat’s raw with it, because his throat’s raw as if it’s his own neck that’s been slit and not hers. He sends them away. He stumbles out of bed, stumbles through the tower and _down_ and into the sewers on instinct. The sound of his footsteps in water is loud. The whale-oil lantern in his hand throws shadows of madness upon the walls, turns everything the blue of the Void, wakes the shadows in the corners so that they dance like black and fathomless eyes.

The Outsider is there.

He has _always_ been there.

Corvo snarls and swings the lantern at him, and the Outsider does not move to block the blow. He lets the glass break upon him and rain down upon the water and the floor. Lets the flames blossom blue upon him, hiss up and down his coat, echo and light the shadows at his back. The blue and purple cloth catches. The shrine is aflame. The roar of it is sudden and huge in the little space, and the heat is like a wall, and Corvo stumbles back – one step, no more, even though the scar on his face itches and he feels the heat crisping the tiny hairs upon his skin. He does not move back at all.

He has grown _so used_ to dying.

The Outsider is just standing there, uncaring, and the fire embraces his form and shivers in his black black eyes. “I’m surprised at you, Corvo,” he says. His voice is so soft, and the hiss and crackle of the flames is loud. The word _surprised_ is making his lips curve upwards in a small smile. “I was so sure you’d guess who it was.”

Corvo gives a _cry_ and lunges forward, no sword, the wind blown up by the fire swirling around him. He grabs the Outsider by the thin shoulders and shoves him back, against the sloping wall and crumbling ruin of the shrine, all burning wood and smoke-charred stone, _hard_ , holds him there and wills for him to _burn_ – and Corvo’s coat is aflame and his hair is aflame and his hands on the being’s shoulders are aflame and it _does not matter_ , because –

And the Outsider says, “no.”

*****

They stand back where they always begin, in a mad room that’s tilted and all in shadow and that opens over a succession of long, _long_ falls. The Void roars around them with a sound like roaring flame. Corvo’s on his hands and knees, again, and it’s hard for him to realize that the pain he feels is only imagined, that all the old burn scars have not opened on his skin. He’s on his hands and knees, and it’s so _hard_ for him to realize that Jessamine’s corpse is not under him. That his hand is not on her collar and his blade is not buried in her throat, and he’s not looking into her face and seeing the life go out of her eyes.

_They are those you've killed. Every single one._

The Outsider pulls him to his feet.

He does not seem angry. He does not even seem surprised. The small smile is still on his face, and his face is _alight_ as if lit by a fire in the waking world. His hands are utterly gentle as he pulls Corvo forward, irresistibly, until he’s standing just over the brink.

“No,” Corvo manages, “no, _please_ –”

Because he _knows_ , now, that the leaps through empty air and _madness_ are so long.

And hand holding him steady is gone, and the Outsider stands behind him to speak into his ear, and the Void howls around them both.

“Again.”


End file.
